mstdn.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.

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FediTips has moved!

The Fediverse is a network of thousands of independent social media servers of many different kinds.

The most popular kind is Mastodon, but it wasn't the first and isn't the only one. Some of the accounts you interact with are on other server types, e.g. @Iancylkowski is on Pixelfed and @theatticdwellers is on PeerTube. There are many Fediverse server types:

➡️ fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-

Whichever type you're signed up on, they connect together to form a social network called the Fediverse.

@feditips I would ask if we would call the #Fediverse a "macronetwork"?

@feditips @Scofisticated no please !! It will remember the french president 😡😡😡
And i don’t want to put negative Links related to this person 😖

@Scofisticated @feditips macronetwork is not great but still better than Fediverse which surely should go in the same bin as "blogosphere"

@feditips@mstdn.social 🫣

You omitted
#calckey from the list. We're like Mastodon, but with bells and whistles

I can't eat my honey for the tears!
🍯 🐝

🤣😉

@feditips@mstdn.social aww, thanks Foxy. You're ace.

Although, I also admire your polkadot duck
😁

@feditips @oldmanspidey Basically they dont do the kind of censorship they split from reddit for. If you think not taking down a post is equivalent to a human rights abuse then you are correct to stay away from these places in general

@reversetilde @oldmanspidey

No, it's not that. It's that the lead developers are the ones who run the problematic servers. Did you actually read the thread I linked to? It explains all this.

@feditips @oldmanspidey Of course it is servers they run. You cant exactly blame them for servers they dont even run can you.

@feditips Unfortunately I had to discover that it does not work that way. The results I get an a hashtag serach differ dramatically depending on how big the instance is that I search from. To test that I did setup my own instance and tested from that and from accounts on smaller and bigger instances. I get A LOT more results on a big instance than on smaller ones. IMHO that defies the purpose of the #Fediverse and is a major problem ...

@phantanews

Less connected servers can mitigate this by using relays, especially the newer topic-based relays:

fedi.tips/using-relays-to-quic

I don't think this is linked to server types though, federation visibility issues would be the same even if every server was the same type.

fedi.tipsUsing relays, groups, directories and scripts to quickly expand a server’s view of the Fediverse | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
More from Fedi.Tips

@feditips subscribing to relay.fedi.buzz topics and sites works great, but the other relays I subscribed are still showing "pending" after eight hours. That does not seem to be a solution.

@feditips

What do you think about Meta joining it with Instagram Threads?

I think that on the one hand it's cool that it gives all kinds of non tech-savvy people easy access to the Fediverse, but on the other hand, many Threads users probably won't use it.

Another problem I see is that Meta could collect data about users on other platforms / instances like Mastodon when they interact with Threads users or vice versa which can happen unknowingly.

@feditips I was wondering whether there's a trick to use the different services but with a single identity? I don't want to have a set of credentials for each service. Maybe with decentralized identity?

@vincentbiret

Your account is tied to the server you signed up on. You can't use it to sign in on another server, even if it was the same type of server.

@feditips that's the impression I had. It just feels strange to have multiple sets of credentials for the FEDIverse when identity federation has existed for over a decade. And now we even have decentralized identities removing the need for a central service.

@vincentbiret

Could you give some examples of identity federation which don't involve centralised services or blockchain?

@feditips without centralized services or blockchain I'm not aware of federated identity solutions out there. I guess you could technically do it with certificates but that ultimately relies on an authority, CRL, etc...

@feditips @vincentbiret
That was the whole point of the original OpenID back in 2005 (notably NOT OpenID Connect).

Supposedly the current alternative is IndieAuth but I haven't looked into that one yet.

@TomatoKigu @feditips first time I hear about it but I'll have to check it out!

@vincentbiret @feditips oh that's a good idea, what you're talking about here is PGP which we could use for that except there's not an easy way to do it. People have to be text lately Saturday to be able to do it

@feditips @Iancylkowski @theatticdwellers PeerTube, I so want it to succeed, but there's nothing interesting on it right now.

@adrianmorales @Iancylkowski @theatticdwellers

If it helps at all, I try to highlight interesting videos over on @FediVideo and there's a playlist at fedi.video/w/p/46iRrwSk1x8vPHn

I know there isn't much right now, but it's a start, and it can be incredibly useful. For example when Blender's YouTube channel was taken down without explanation they started a PeerTube instance to make sure the videos were available. You can see it at video.blender.org and follow the main account at @blender

@Vincent Biret @Fedi.Tips "Federated Single Sign-on : Makes private/protected resources on external sites as accessible as on local sites." That is listed under features for the Streams platform.

@shimriez

Couldn't see much on the Streams forge, is that Mike Macgirvin's?

@feditips @Iancylkowski @theatticdwellers I should note that I seem to be encountering compatibility issues between mastodon and some other activitypub apps like pixelfed or peertube. I follow a peertube account but as far as I can tell I've not seen a single post of theirs show up in my timeline.

So it is also highly dependent on whether or not the software that runs the instance you're on even supports the types of data they receive.

@dragonarchitect @Iancylkowski @theatticdwellers

PT used to have federation problems on older versions, is the server for the account you're following on an older version of PT?

@feditips kind of want to try calckey but the lack of mobile apps is odd

@64bithero

It's very new compared to Mastodon, there hasn't been time for them to develop yet. Mastodon has been going since 2016.

@64bithero Why? With browser in "desk" mode very comfortable. @feditips

@64bithero@mstdn.games @feditips@mstdn.social It's very well designed for mobile, so what I recommend is to create a "lite app"/shortcut from the website. Either using the "install" button in Firefox (Chrome has something similar I guess), or using something like Hermit or Native Alpha to do it.
That has worked great for me!